Museum Informatics: Spring 2009

Details

Prerequisites: None. Open to Advanced Undergraduates (LIS 490 MUU) or Graduate students (LIS490MUG)

Assessment: A series of homeworks and short assignments and a final paper

Course Overview

This course will explore issues related to the use of computers in museums. This includes both how museums use computers to record, preserve, classify and manage their collections, and how computers may be used to help visitors and scholars to make their most of their museums visits. It considers conventional physical museums, as well as other organizations with museum-like features such as archives, botanical gardens, special collections, as well as purely virtual collections. We will consider how computers are or could be used in museum settings. This can mean many different things including:

computerized collections records databases

computerization of the management processes of a museum

federation of records among museums

providing online access museum collections

museum websites

online web-based interactive experiences

computer kiosks within museums

large screen displays in museums

mobile technologies for supplementing museum visits

Contexts

There are many kinds of museum, and museum-like contexts where computational technologies can be applied in particular ways, including:

art museums

science museums

museums of culture

botanical gardens

historic neighborhoods

temporary exhibitions in public places

Who Is This Class Intended For?

This is a class offered through the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. It is open to students from other departments.

There are two sections: 490MUG for graduate students, and LIS490MUU for undergraduates. Undergraduates must be juniors or seniors. The graduate section has 4 hours, the undergraduate 3 hours. The main difference is that the graduate students are required to submit an additional paper.

The class is aimed both at people who consider themselves as mostly a museum-interested person or a technology-interested person. In either case we are looking at applying computers in museums.

Museum Informatics is interdisciplinary work and so we hope that we will have students from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds. By working together on various short projects we will learn how to make best use of the diversity of our skills, backgrounds and intellectual traditions.